Where did the water go on Mars? Answer in equatorial glaciers

By JOHN JOHNSON JR., Los Angeles Times

Last update: November 21, 2008 - 11:38 PM

In a discovery that partly answers the question of where all the water went on Mars, scientists have found vast, debris-covered glaciers much nearer the equatorial region than anyone had expected, said a report Friday in the journal Science.

The glaciers, estimated to contain at least as much water as Lake Huron and possibly as much as the entire Great Lakes, were found by ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.

"We have found a big chunk of the missing water that people have known must be there," said Ali Safaeinili, a member of the radar team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, Calif.

Scientists analyzing Martian topography have seen lots of evidence of water-caused erosion on the planet, but until now the only deposits of ice have been seen at the poles.

How did the ice get there? The best guess, said John W. Holt, a researcher for the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Texas, is that climate change was brought on by changes in Mars' rotational axis over time. Because Mars doesn't have a large moon to keep its axis relatively stable, as the Earth does, the planet can tilt dramatically, redistributing the sun's heat and energy and shifting the poles around.

These icy deposits may have lain in their current state as long as 200 million years, Holt said.

Knowing that astronauts could obtain water in the more temperate regions would probably make a manned mission to the Red Planet more feasible. It is still unclear, however, whether the water is accessible from the surface. Holt said the radar measurements indicated that it could be covered by as much as 30 feet of debris.

"If you could get a backhoe in there you could get at it," said Jeffrey Plaut, a geologist at JPL. "You'd have to figure out how to get a backhoe to Mars."

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